The Bacon Knit
This morning I created an abomination; it was a nexus of lust, greed and gluttony weaved from the purest desires of man. When I came to, I was covered in fat, grease and the slimy manna of sin. Perhaps I have doomed all of humanity by unleashing this upon the world; if the world explodes tomorrow you’ll know that it’s all my fault.
A raw mess of bacon. Nom.
It all started when my friend John asked me, possibly inspired by my tale of the bacon explosion, whether bacon could be knitted instead of simply weaved. Since I was on vacation and was bored because I was waiting for my stew to cook and just got a pound of bacon last night, I knew I had to do this. For science!
The hardest part, he thought, would be taking strips of bacon and combining them into one long “yarn”. So he enlisted the help of The Basil Queen, who recommended some fancy cooking technique that involves fine needlework or something. Fie! My KNITCRAFT skill may be poor, but I do not need fancy cooking techniques to knit bacon. I simply used my LEVEL 40 YARNTECH: THE JOINING and weaved more bacon in at the end of each strip. Twenty minutes later, I had, according to Google, the Interweb’s first patch of knitted bacon.
A proper establishing shot for scale.
Knitting bacon is, in case you haven’t guessed, hard. The fact that the bacon is exceedingly greasy makes it somewhat easy: they slide on to the chopsticks really well. (I used a pair of chopsticks for each knitting “needle”. I actually have been knitting with chopsticks a lot years ago. That was really the only natural part of this exercise.) The problem is that it’s hard to make out where the bacon strips end and where to stick your “needle” in.
As you can see, I knitted only three and a half rows and then gave up. The mess of bacon was just so… messy… that I couldn’t figure out where to put the needles in anymore. Also some of those strands were so thin that I was afraid the whole thing would fall apart if I pulled too hard. Perhaps next time I’ll twist/spin the bacon into bacon-yarn first.
This is what happens when a bacon knit meets gravity.
The bacon knit is an unholy mesh of fat and meat, a writhing mass of grease engaged in an eternal orgy of gluttony. (If you’ve been reading Jack (NSFW link!), the bacon knit is basically like an edible Valley of Lust (NSFW link!).) It can only really be appreciated if it’s lifted up in the air though… Dripping, oozing, oh so delicious.
Time to shove this sucker in the oven! I followed the recipe for a mundane bacon weave: bacon in cast iron skillet, skillet in oven, 400 degrees, 15 to 20 minutes.
After twenty minutes of baking at 400 degrees.
It turned out that I needed to leave it in there for half an hour. Since the bacon was knitted/knotted it took longer to cook through. Also, because I left the “needles” in there (you’ll notice that I switched plastic chopsticks with bamboo ones before putting it in the oven) most of the knit was not touching the hot skillet surface.
Draining the fat so it isn't too deadly...
The biggest problem (and also the best part) about a bacon knit is that the knotting and knitting, along with the multiple layers of bacon where strips are joined, seals the fat in. Half a pound of bacon should not produce this little grease when cooked. (You can see the grease level in the previous two pictures.) In fact, cooking three strips of bacon last night I ended up with twice as much grease. This is because all that artery-destroying oil is sealed inside each stitch.
This means that the bacon knit is deadly, but also delicious.
You can kind of see the stitching here.
You can get the same fatty, chewy effect of bacon by beer battering strips of bacon and then deep frying them. However, knitted bacon gives the satisfaction of being only bacon and having that “sheet” integrity that makes it possible for you to eat the thing off a “knitting needle”. I found that the most satisfying way of eating one of these things is to just dangle it off a needle and bite it from the bottom. Om nom nom. Maybe I’ll call this a Bacon Knit Ka-Bob? Bacon Flag?
Ultimately, bacon knit is not as useful as bacon weave, harder to make and way messier. However it is more delicious (more bacon per square inch?) and, well, it’s bacon knitted into a patch. Seriously. I’d imagine that this would be epic if you put it in a burger…
I feel like I did science today. Awesome science.
Update: The bacon knit patch has been improved (with cabling) and applied to the most delicious BLT ever made! Check it out!
Oh dear. I didn’t think you could do anything more terrifying than the beer-battered bacon. Apparently I was wrong.
I can’t tell if this is brilliant or deeply disturbing. Probably both.
Crocheted bacon would be much much harder to do I imagine…
[...] 11 02 2009 Bacon can do anything [...]
Well I don’t actually know how to crochet, but I’d imagine that a strong of crocheted bacon would be tastier and less messy.
[...] Knitting bacon. Need I say any more? (via The Presurfer) [...]
I think twisting the bacon would work a lot better. Also you could start with say 4 chopsticks and then remove one as the work gets more messy so you can find the holes easier. That way you could get more length. Another idea would be to cut the bacon lengthwise in half and twist it together, to get a 2 ply bacon. Or just knit the halves as singles to get a lace weight bacon.
But what you did looks very nice and delicious. Good work.
It looks delicious. I think though, that it would be easier to knit with bacon yarn like this… http://www.holidayyarns.com/baconswatchyarnsm.png
nom nom nom
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…what #2 beautyredined said.
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